Welcome Home

I did the thing I never thought I would do: I put a college decal sticker on the rear windshield of my car. I also attached a red lanyard to my car key, further proof of my vague sense of school spirit. I would have bought a sweatshirt from the bookstore, that pinnacle emblem of college pride, but being a grad student isn’t exactly the most lucrative career and a girl’s gotta eat. So, lanyard and sticker had to do.

Classes began last week, and it felt strange at first to see the campus so populated after having it empty to ourselves all summer. I am realizing that I didn’t actually go to Real College before. Overpriced Private University wasn’t anything like this Huge State School. There weren’t large patches of grass upon which students tossed Frisbees; there was Washington Square Park and we shared it with bums, drug dealers, old chess players, and the ghosts of the bodies buried under the pavement. Here, the sidewalks are chalked with colorful Greek letters imploring you underfoot to rush this or that sorority (entrance to which is surely based on one’s ability to write so perfectly in pink sidewalk chalk). The uniform for boys and girls is roughly the same: college/frat/sorority tshirt paired with cargo shorts/denim skirts/gym shorts and flip-flops. I stand out in my I Used to Work at a Hedge Fund attire, but that’s the point, I’m their teacher. It’s strange to feel at once like a freshman, very much new to this environment, and yet removed from them in both age and authority. On my first day of teaching English 101, I was nervous and sweaty and probably talked too fast as twenty-one pairs of eyes stared at me like I was an alien, but by the second class my nerves were calmer and I may have actually taught them something! Tomorrow we are learning about argumentation through the stases and I’m keeping my fingers crossed for a good class discussion.

Tomorrow afternoon I have my fiction workshop, my raison d’être. I left last week’s class so elated, so full of reassurance that I made the right choice in coming here and pursing this writing career. I suppose I can admit now that until that class, I wasn’t entirely convinced. I still don’t know if I’m weird or complicated or even smart enough to be enrolled in a master’s program – especially when they lump us with the English PhD kids who give new meaning to dedication to the cause – but I know for certain that I find a special brand of happiness in a creative writing workshop. And I’m making friends, the kind of friends that feel like I’ve known them forever or maybe I just wish I had, Papa Bear and A-bomb and Ramona Quimby and TJ the Worrier.

There is a sign as you drive into my apartment complex that says “Welcome Home.” I hate that sign. “This isn’t my home!” I want to yell back, but I’m slowly reaching a point where I’m less horrified by that thought. It’s not home yet, here in this unfurnished apartment, but it’s becoming a place where I have friends who will go with me to Ikea to buy a sofa. If moving taught me one thing, it’s that the friends who will carry your furniture are the ones worth having.